Week 17: Bannon the Critic Pans the Scandal Everyone’s Binge-watching

No less a political authority than Steve Bannon told 60 Minutes this week that there’s “nothing” to the Russia investigation. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “It’s a total and complete farce. Russian collusion is a farce.”

“It’s far from conclusive that the Russians had any impact on this election,” Bannon responded.

“Well, that’s not the question. Did they try to influence the American election? That’s not what the investigation is about,” Rose said.

No sooner had Bannon categorically brushed the Trump Tower scandal aside like a glob of reporter’s spittle on the sleeve of his Brooks Brothers blazerdid the whole mess catch fire again. President Donald Trump proved that he watched the Bannon interview—in which Bannon called the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey perhaps the biggest mistake in “modern political history”—by reigniting his feud with Comey. Trump dispatched press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to brief reporters, and she came this close to calling for Comey’s prosecution as a leaker. “If there's ever a moment where we feel someone's broken the law, particularly if they're the head of the FBI, I think that's something that certainly should be looked at,” Sanders said.

Sanders voiced the words, but they were vintage Trump. It was only a couple of months ago that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was Trump’s public piñata, subject to the president’s ridicule on Twitter. But the visible beating Trump gave the AG, we learned this week, was nothing compared to the private scouring he gave him in May when he learned that sacking Comey had resulted in the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller. Trump erupted like a barrel of Mentos dropped into a swimming pool of Diet Coke, the New York Times reported, and directed his ire at Sessions, who was in the Oval Office with the president when the Mueller news arrived. Trump blamed him personally and loudly for having set the special counsel investigation into motion with his recusal in March. It’ll be a long time before people stop hearing the word “idiot” spoken in Trump’s voice when they see Sessions on TV.

Bannon’s farce gathered additional steam this week as campaign director Paul Manafort’s spokesman Jason Maloni appeared before Mueller’s grand jury, presumably to unlock Manafort’s Russia connections. We also learned that Michael Flynn’s son, who worked for Flynn, has fallen into the special counsel’s investigation dragnet. As Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post, Bannon hinted in the Charlie Rose interview that the “breadth” of the Mueller investigation may have taken it places we haven’t even imagined. Will the Trump Tower scandal’s final destination be a planet of money laundering, tax evasion, or untoward behavior with mobsters and oligarchs?

Bannon seems at this point in the story unstained by the Russian taint, not yet exposed as a participant in a shady meeting or a skeezy business deal. Yet he insists on playing semantic checkers with the Trump Tower scandal when he knows the board overflows with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chess pieces. Why? Because it’s a farce and there’s nothing to it? Or because the investigation could spell his leader’s undoing and the longer he can obfuscate the better?

Bannon, no dummy, dodges what almost everybody now concedes: That Russian operatives went high and low throughout campaign 2016 in hopes of jigging its outcome. According to American intelligence, the campaign against our campaign was authorized by Putin to subvert the electoral process. President Barack Obama acknowledged this when he retaliated against Putin by drenching Russia in new sanctions.

Consider the timeline: In 2016, Russians dangled campaign oppo in front of Donald Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner at Trump Tower. They hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails as well as John Podesta’s. They placed about 3,000 ads on Facebook through 470 fake accounts with the goal of “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” as Facebook put it in a statement. Their Twitter bots sprayed fake news from accounts dressed in folksy Midwestern camouflage. In a burst of creativity, the Russians have even invested their energy in the Texas secession movement. Russian hackers also targeted Democratic House candidates. And after the campaign concluded, top Trump officials Kushner, Sessions and Michael Flynn concealed their communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“I am very concerned about the assault on our institutions coming from both an external source—read Russia—and an internal source, the president himself,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said this summer. (Even Trump has allowed that Russians interfered in the election, although he’s diluted that statement by saying other nations might have interfered, too.)

You don’t have to take spymaster Clapper’s word for it. We now know that Trump and his associates have mingled with Russians with fraternal vigor. In 2015, Trump associate Felix Sater, who was lining up a deal to build the Trump Tower Moscow, boasted in an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that their efforts were destined to win Trump the presidency. Let’s not forget the smutty Steele dossier, which alleges the Russians has assembled kompromat on Trump that they can use to blackmail him or that Trump leaned on his intelligence chiefs earlier in March to publicly deny that his campaign had cooperated with Russians.

Each new day seems to bring fresh Russian shenanigans. A member of Putin's political party went on Russian TV within our current news cycle to brag about stealing the U.S. election. Yahoo reported an FBI investigation of the Sputnik news agency to determine whether the outlet is dispensing propaganda in the U.S. without filing the proper Foreign Agents Registration Act paperwork. Sensing a greater design to all this activism, New York Times media columnist James Rutenberg wrote this week that the Kremlin has “built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century.”

Bannon may be right that Trump’s team and the Russians didn’t actively collude in the 2016 campaign. But how can you read a summary of the campaign and still maintain that the Russians sat out the election? You can’t. Russian tendrils have surfaced everywhere, and as Mueller continues his sleuthing, I suspect he’ll find Russian tentacles as well.

If Bannon would rather call this Russian interference a farce rather than collusion, who am I to split hairs?